judicial checks and balances. One of the more troubling developments over the past few months has been a steady stream of appeals against the state of emergency that have been overruled by the Conseil d’État, or Council of State, the country’s highest administrative court. These include an appeal by environmental activists during the U.N. conference on climate change (COP21) in Paris against the assigned residence of some activists under the state of emergency provisions. The Conseil d’État ruled in favor of the Interior Ministry’s argument that environmental protests could disturb the public order — even though the house arrests and protest bans were not aimed at “preventing the commission of further acts of terrorism.” Then, on Jan. 27, the Conseil d’État rejected an appeal by the Paris-based Human Rights League to suspend the state of emergency. These are just some of the more high-profile cases that have made the news. The cases of ordinary French Muslims losing their appeals against assigned residency orders rarely make headlines. But they have been systematic enough for Amnesty International to warn that “[a]dministrative courts and the Council of State have very rarely challenged the information included in the notes collected by the intelligence services” and that “courts had tended to show strong deference to the arguments put forward by the Ministry of Interior.”